After years of providing a first class environment for the residents of West Beach, the West Beach Trust has moved under new management, which appears to have a completely self-serving, empire building agenda.

Issue 1:
The beautiful public golf course has been decimated by the development of a new Baseball facility (I’ll come back to that!)
The Golf Course is now only 15 holes, and the layout is incredibly confusing, to the point that the once heavily used course is now virtually abandoned, and golfists are staying away in droves.
Various fairways have been allowed to fall into neglect, grass is dying off, and the weeds are taking over. The groundsmen would never allow this to happen unless they have been ordered to, they do a brilliant job usually.
At what point does the public golf course become an unviable venture, and re-purposed as something else completely?

Issue 2:
Much of the wetlands has been lost to a new artificially surfaced soccer stadium, and car parking to try and appease local residents, who are often unable to park outside their own houses.
The whole facility has been extremely ill considered in it’s location, visibility in and out of the area is atrocious, and IMO it is only a matter of time until somebody (probably a child) is run over in the area by a speeding car.

Issue 3:
The new Baseball facility.
The South Australian government provided $1 million in 2011-12 to upgrade facilities to include a “multi-purpose grass playing field”.
The trust has used this PUBLIC money to build a dedicated baseball facility with an ENORMOUS number of high powered lights (think Football Park!), cutting heavily into the public golf course, and restricting access to huge tracts of lands for local residents, who previously used the area for exercising, often with their pets. There is already a baseball facility on Tapleys Hill Road not 2km away – What the hell do we need this for?

Issue 4:
Traffic.
The Charles Sturt Council is preparing to spend a significant amount of money to apply a band-aid to the traffic issues caused by the Trust’s ill-advised developments, which have obviously been commenced without liason between the two parties.
At the end of the day, the local residents are getting screwed over by all of this, NONE of which was made public before work commenced.

Issue 5:
The Woolshed.
What a joke this is. Why is this not-that-old (anyone know when it was built?) structure so poorly maintained that it has been condemned as unsafe? Why is the facility still unfenced and secured if it is unsafe?
You’ve really dropped the ball here, Trust..

The Big Issue:
The West Beach Trust.
From the Annual Report – Click Here to view)
Why is the Trust being viewed as a Business that needs to grow? The trust was created to benefit the residents, not the Board and its’ poor excuse for a chairperson.

We need to take a long hard look at the Trust, and remove the current incompetent management. Let’s get somebody in charge who actually cares about the area and understands why the trust was created in the first place.